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GridChem Announces Success

The GridChem partners announced today the wrap-up of a successful autumn 2005. A key component of the project, education and outreach, aptly met the challenge of reaching new users and communities.

The GridChem project's mission is to "enable computational and experimental scientists to do 'more' computational chemistry by providing capability computing resources and services at their fingertips." (https://www.gridchem.org/project/mission.htm) GridChem has enhanced the cyberinfrastructure with its development and deployment of an easy-to-use interface that is made available to researchers through a straight forward grant process. The environment consists of a three-tiered architecture including a client, grid middleware server, and distributed high-end computational resources. For more information, visit http://www.gridchem.org/.

The kick-off for the outreach efforts was an Access Grid (AG) event, GridChem: An Application Oriented Computational Grid, held on October 10, 2005. Hosted by the Ohio Supercomputer Center and featuring presentations from all of the GridChem partners, the workshop included topics such as project overview, interface demonstration, back-end features, and allocations & support. A number of sites from around the U.S. participated including academic institutions and government laboratories.

In addition to the AG event, GridChem hosted a Birds of a Feather meeting, workshop, and demos at the Supercomputing Conference (SCI05) in Seattle. The GridChem partners with booths displayed posters, distributed marketing materials, and provided GridChem client demos. The conference gave the project international exposure and generated significant interest in the cyberinfrastructure for chemistry.

"Outreach and education is a key component of this project," said Leslie Southern, GridChem Lead for OSC. "The developers have created an architecture that dramatically changes how chemists use computational resources. The education and outreach group is spreading the word about the project so that the community can fully appreciate how it makes grid computing more accessible," said Southern.

GridChem partners include the Center for Computational Sciences / University of Kentucky, Center for Computation and Technology / Louisiana State University, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) / University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, OSC / The Ohio State University, and Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) / University of Texas.

The project is supported by the National Science Foundation NMI Program under Award #04-38312.